A blog from the South Dakota Library Association's representative to the American Library Association

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Harry Potter Alliance

While wandering around the exhibits at ALA in January, I came across a booth for a group called the Harry Potter Alliance. You may already know about them, especially if you are in public libraries, but I had not heard of them before. The HPA is a group that is working to make young people into activists. They take Harry Potter fans and get them working on issues such as equality, human rights, and literacy. They claim that their weapon is love - who can't support a group like that. So what has the group done? Here are a few of the accomplishments they list on their page:

Raising over $123,000 for Partners in Health and sending five cargo planes of life-saving supplies to Haiti.

Donations of over 250,000 books across the world through HPA's Accio Books campaign (love the campaign name!).

Partnership between Walk Free and over 400,000 HPA fans convinced Warner Brothers to change the sourcing of their Harry Potter chocolate line to be 100% UTZ or fair trade.

At ALA, the Harry Potter Alliance handed out pamphlets on getting youth organized to participate in National Library Legislative Day. Getting support for our libraries at the national level is important and who better to push our message home than our youth. Libraries Transform everyone but we have great power to transform young people. Let's help them tell their stories to our national leaders. They don't have to go to Washington to do so, there is a Virtual Library Legislative Day that they can participate in through their phones, e-mail, and Twitter.